Writing to Cuba: Filibustering and Cuban Exiles in the United States (review)

This book is a significant and much-needed study of the transnational print cultures of Cuban exiles in the United States during the middle of the nineteenth century. The archival aspects of this project are impressive, for Lazo excavates a variety of obscure newspapers, pamphlets, and books from collections in both the United States and Cuba and presents a wealth of new material to readers. But Writing to Cuba also contains insightful discussions of the complexities of nineteenth-century filibustering, the tensions between transnational cultural production and nationalist canons, and the contradictions of revolutionary masculinity.

Lazo looks especially closely at twelve newspapers that were published in New York and New Orleans between 1848 and 1860. These papers were mostly in Spanish but sometimes had English-language sections, and many featured articles about political questions as well as literary selections such as poetry and fiction. The editors and contributors to these newspapers were some of Cuba's most celebrated writers, including Cirilo Villaverde and Juan Clemente Zenea, who wrote to Cuba from the United States as part of an effort to connect print culture to military projects that aimed to wrest Cuba from the Spanish empire. Lazo does a good job of charting the changing attitudes these exiles had toward the United States and the question of Cuban annexation, as well as toward slavery and emancipation.

Chapter 1 analyzes the term "filibuster" as a keyword of empire that could accommodate perspectives favoring as well as opposing U.S. annexation and Spanish colonialism. While the word was often used as a synonym for pirate or "criminal adventurer" (p. 6), during the nineteenth century Cuban exiles and others conceived of the filibuster as a fighter for democracy and egalitarianism. Lazo shows how exiled filibusteros tried to use newspapers as "weapons in a battle for Cuba" (p. 22) despite and in part because of their dislocation and deterritorialization. In the United States, exiled Cubans could make strong statements about Spanish colonialism that they could not make in Cuba because of censorship. But that very condition of separation from Cuba and Cuban readers also made the filibusteros' project more difficult, and ultimately a "tension between military action and the written word" (p. 59) recurs in this literature, marking the limits of transnational print culture as a way of affecting political change in mid-nineteenth century Cuba.

The second chapter surveys a range of these newspapers and argues that they helped to produce a proto-nationalist discourse about Cuba, one that sometimes paradoxically coexisted with support for U.S. annexation because of the interest, among exiles, in states rights positions within U.S. revolutionary writings. Chapter 3 explores the connection between militarism and masculinity in exiles' writings. Here, Lazo argues that the emphasis on a militant masculinity was a response to writers' anxieties about whether men of letters could effectively fight Spanish colonialism through print culture, and he complicates this story by also focusing on the work of Emilia Casanova de Villaverde, an important political activist in exile circles. Chapter 4 is about a newspaper called El Mulato, which spoke out against slavery and challenged exile leaders' silence or acquiescence on this issue. The final chapter reads Cirilo Villaverde's famous novel Cecilia Valdés in relation to Villaverde's work as a filibustero. Here Lazo makes the compelling argument that Villaverde's "historical re-creation of Cuba" is the "ultimate filibustering gesture" (p. 190) since the novel effaces the conditions of its own transnational production and tries to "seize the territory of the Cuban nation when it appears that the military battle for the island has been lost" (p. 19).

This book should appeal to scholars in a range of fields, especially literature and history. The concrete and careful account of the specific conditions that enabled a nineteenth-century transnational print culture is especially illuminating, and Lazo's analysis of the strengths and...